The FriendFeed Disjointed Comments Problem

FriendFeed is great. I like the service but let me describe the Disjointed Comments problem. The aggregation needs to group based upon link. For example, Louis Gray wrote a nice post titled “TechMeme Leaderboard’s Top Ten: Six Months In.” On his FriendFeed alone there are 3 seperate entries to this post. Three places to like or hide and three places to comment. An entry directly submitted to FriendFeed, an entry to Google Reader sharing his post feed, and the post feed itself.

The key to me to satisfy the blogosphere is easily displays all of this activity (liking and commenting) back on the original post. I have already seen an early wordpress plugin displaying inline the FriendFeed comments of the post.

The next step for FriendFeed is to combine/group entries that link to the destination URL. Positioned in the FriendFeed by the last reference. So in other words if Louis bookmarked his post a fourth time on del.icio.us then the whole group would bubble to the top of his FriendFeed.

So once they are grouped together the convesation at least on the Louis Gray FriendFeed is not disjointed.

However, the next problem is me. I liked the post. So Louis had it shared in 3 or 4 places. What if I share it / link it in a couple of places. Google Reader and Del.icio.us. What if people comment on my FriendFeed?

This is conversation Louis might want to know about. So now FriendFeed groups my conversations with Louis’s FriendFeed. This is probably not a big deal if just I share it. But what about when it is shared 500 times?

Ok So FriendFeed does all of that. Great, Huh? Well now the bloggers want more. That wordpress plugin now needs to embed the conversation on the original post. Then maybe just maybe the blogosphere is happy. Well probably not. It doesn’t happen very often. 🙂

6 thoughts on “The FriendFeed Disjointed Comments Problem”

So… I could: 1) Post the blog post, 2) Post it to FriendFeed, 3) Add it to Del.icio.us, 4) Submit it to Digg, 5) Hype it on StumbleUpon, 6) Share it on Google Reader, and 7) Send a Twitter about it.

On FriendFeed, that would get annoying (one reason I usually don't do that). But there are definitely people who only get it on the blog, or on Google Reader or on Twitter, so there are often duplicates.

What is the proposed solution?

“Louis Gray added a new post “TechMeme Such and Such” and shared it on Google Reader and sent a Tweet: “TechMeme Such and Such”…

My proposed solution is for FriendFeed to group the links together and show all the conversation together in one block. All the likes together. Then a display of all the comments. This would be a lot less confusing on the FriendFeed. Then you could submit to 7 different places and it would not be as annoying. Also then someone could more easily use the API to get the conversation back on the original blog.

My proposed solution is for FriendFeed to group the links together and show all the conversation together in one block. All the likes together. Then a display of all the comments. This would be a lot less confusing on the FriendFeed. Then you could submit to 7 different places and it would not be as annoying. Also then someone could more easily use the API to get the conversation back on the original blog.